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Valheim 1.0 review
One of the best survival games around is finally complete.
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What is it? A Viking-themed survival game set in a procedurally generated open world.Release date: September 09, 2026 (1.0)Expect to pay: $30/£23.49Developer: Iron Gate ABPublisher: Coffee Stain PublishingReviewed on: Intel i7 9700K, RTX 4070 Ti, 16GB RAMSteam Deck: VerifiedLink: Official site
After a day-long battle with one of Valheim's big bosses, I return to my modest cabin in the woods to recover. I'm exhausted, my weapons and armor are mostly broken, and I've burned through my meager supply of food and arrows. I don't even have a spare torch left to light my way home. Even though I was victorious, the cold and rainy night doesn't put me in the mood for a celebration.
Then I spot a shadowy figure in the gloom, leaning on a walking stick, one blue eye gleaming from beneath its hood. Odin. It's frickin' Odin himself, y'know, Thor's dad? He's visiting the exiled tenth world of Valheim to peep me in person. Suddenly my mood lifts and I feel like a complete badass. Odin knows who I am.
This isn't my first visitation from the ancient god: I've been playing Valheim since its early access release in 2021, and I've seen Odin a few times before. But darn it, it's still a thrill whenever he appears to silently approve of my valor. And after a long wait, I can finally prove myself worthy: Valheim 1.0 is here, and even though I've been playing this game for five years, it's still got plenty of magic.
I'm a fallen norse warrior, delivered via Valkyrie into a cursed world to vanquish Odin's enemies. But this is no RPG, it's a survival game, and those always start with a lot of backbreaking work: chopping down trees, shattering boulders, hunting deer, and constructing a base where I can sleep and do some crafting. There's no rest for the dead.
The procedurally generated world of Valheim is a massive disc, separated into biomes and split by oceans, and the deeper you explore from your starting point at the disc's center, the more dangerous the world becomes. Originally with six biomes (including the ocean), more were added over the past several years, culminating in the deep north: the frozen final realm where you finish your work for Odin. And yes, rare as this is for a survival game, there is an actual ending, though you can continue playing in your world once you've seen it.
For such a massive world, there are no quests in Valheim, not really: early on you'll stumble across an altar that will summon the first of several boss monsters, each which drop an item you'll need to survive and thrive in the next biome. But other than an occasional marker on your map, Valheim is a self-guided tour that leaves progression to your discretion and motivation.
In that, it succeeds wonderfully: I've spent nearly 150 hours in the game and I've never felt a need for NPCs to fill my ears with exposition nor wanted a quest log to give me direction. Valheim 1.0 does add animated dream sequences after each vanquished boss, and while they're pretty cool, the game was perfectly fine without them. The world is beautiful and mysterious and the urge to explore it comes simply from wanting to discover what's across the sea or on the other side of a mountain range.